GatewayRedbirds.com

Yeah, it's been a rainy year and a lot of people are having problems. When we bought our house, we put in a perimeter drain (basically the same as a sump pump only gravity drained instead of pumped out) on the inside of the foundation wall because tehre was water in the crawlspace, and then we put in an exterior french drain on one side where I thought a lot of the water was coming from. In hindsight, I wish I had waited because, low and behold when we had rain as all the snow was melting, I found out real quick what the main problem was.



The last shot in the video is where the perimeter drain is letting out, and I'm guessing the vast majority of THAT is coming from the side where the water is overtopping the wall. I got under the house to see and saw nothing getting except where water was coming through a vent on that side.

Anyway, a little inlet solved that problem of water over topping the wall and we're in good shape. Still, the inlet project, which I did myself, cost less than $2k. The perimeter drain and all the other work was $15k. Houses and water just don't mix. Period.

We lived in an older home in San Mateo, Ca during the 60's. The furnace was in a basement room and a sump pump was there- which we assumed the prior owner installed, because there was a high water mark on the walls indicating prior flooding up to about 5 feet. Bad scene for the furnace for sure.

There is an underground stream that ran down to San Francisco Bay, a few miles away. Whenever we had heavy rains our sump would fill quickly and I timed it coming on every 30 seconds in bad weather and saturated ground.

The pump was electric, of course, and often heavy storms brought power outages too. Trying to bail water by hand was a bad family scene, as the basement only had an outside stair well. Soaked to the skin were we.

There was a happy ending here of sorts, as my wife discovered a siphon 3 way hose fitting that attached to our water pipe outside. Two of the holes had screw fittings where you attached to your water hoses, while the other had an open and close cap. We ran oue hose into the sump hole, turned on the water valve outside, and opened the relief valve on the 3 way, and the water and hoses became a siphon drawing water back out of the basement. The water was being returned to a saturated ground outside, and we were playing circles, as the sump would refill from the ground water around the house-but we were staying ahead of it while keeping the basement from flooding beyond the sump.

If you can find one of these gadgets, it is a cheap and quick temporary solution to an immediate problem. It's like getting gasoline out of a gas tank in a car, but you don't get a mouthful of gasoline when it starts to flow. Good luck.